Hi John.
I'm sure people will have thoughts on this (especially developers like Tom
and Phil who've done their own beta tests), however having been both a beta
and alpha tester myself for some projects including Entombed and smugglers
4, I can probably give a few thoughts.
First, what is the purpose of beta testing? To make sure that your game runs
smoothly on different machines and configurations, to make sure your players
aren't doing anything to crash the game, to get your players' thoughts on
possible fixes, exploits and features.
Given these purposes I would say that beta testing is necessary, sinse the
last thing you want is to release your game and find it doesn't work on
windows vista or that someone has been able to cheat their way through by
ducking sinse your monsters don't targit ducking opponents in the way you
planned.
Beta testing is also however not necessarily something that everyone is
ideally suited for or something which people should undertake lightly. For
example, if you have a game playable on three difficulties your testers
should be prepared to try all three, and to try all the in game weapons,
indeed the more things your testers can test out the better so as to
discover bugs and check the way things are behaving, especially if for
example you have to release several bug fixes for your testers to try before
you nale one particular issue. This is one reason why i personally wouldn't
agree to beta test a game unless I was certain I could both devote enough
time to it and was motivated enough to play it over and over again to
discover bugs etc.
I'll also add that occasionally when you release a game you might have some
less than helpful comments from some people anyway, for example someone
might complain at an audio logo being too long and reffuse to play more of
the game (I am not joking I've seen this happen).
So for all of these reasons I'd suggest a private alpha or early beta test
followed by a public one, sinse hopefully you will be able to catch at least
some of the more obvious bugs and issues privately and also have a core of
hopefully compitant people who will help you track things down and test all
elements of the game more exhaustively perhaps than the general public.
All the best,
Dark.
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